


Mask

by mulders_modem



Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 04:13:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5442908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mulders_modem/pseuds/mulders_modem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A cable news affiliate is mysteriously gassed. Its employees (and Massive Dynamic's Nina Sharp) seem to know more than they're letting on. Olivia and Peter, newlyweds and parents, seek answers. Walter has questions regarding his grandchild. Featuring flashbacks and a slice of life in the house of Farnsworth and Lee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mask

**Author's Note:**

> This is a drabble that took on a life of its own. If it's well-received, there may be a sequel to follow.

Margie pressed a finger to the trigger and fired rivulets of foundation against the anchorwoman’s complexion. The clock above the bulb-framed mirror read 5:45a.m. Tracey Snell had arrived half an hour earlier, chugging her overpriced coffee. She and married co-anchor Lance Wicks made a special effort to arrive separately. He was brushing his veneers meticulously in the station bathroom, but he still reeked of her perfume. Margie, on the other hand, was the only office-dweller not consumed with their lukewarm affair. Instead she focused on hiding the prominent cold sore above Tracey’s upper lip.

“It could get infected,” Tracey pouted. She jerked backward, offended, from the steel-tipped gun. “For all I know, it’s your machine...”

“I’ll clean it, Miss Snell,” Margie acquiesced. She turned to wipe down the instrument with an antibacterial cloth and stood on her tiptoes in vain. She hoped to catch the eye of one of the cameramen. Reporters typed busily into the teleprompter from a hub of cubicles beyond the camera bank. Several people answered phones in the dark, or monitored a grainy live feed.

Will Ben ever acknowledge that one night stand we had after the network Christmas gala? Margie wondered from afar. I wasn’t my best, but at our age who--

Tracey gave a sudden, piercing shriek behind her. Margie reeled and stumbled backward. The anchor’s feet bicycled, frantically spiking the air. Her hands threaded past her frosted hair and clawed at her face. Fingernails buried themselves in the wet, stringing viscera and peeled her bloody jaw.

“Another one,” Margie voiced drolly. She strode out to notify her coworkers. Tracey gurgled and spasmed. Foam spat from her parted lips and dotted the vanity mirror. The loudest sound in the room was neither the victim nor the resulting havoc, but the plastic slam of a warning switch. Each reporter pulled a hard-shell valise from beneath their desk and retrieved an individual visor.

Cameramen and reception staff launched themselves at the storage closet in a blind panic. They squared each clear shield over their mouths and clutched a pump at one end of a long, hissing tubule. A wisp of gray smoke crept through the ventilation system and expanded rapidly until it clouded the room. Every employee jostled for a chance at exit, pushed a crooked elbow or a well-timed fist to a familiar face. En mass they stampeded. Behind them, the door slammed, followed by a dull echo that was not retreat.

Lance Wicks’ muscled torso butted against the sink counter. His skull thwacked its marble ledge twice, and heavily. The newscaster slid to the floor. His chiseled face turned a featureless implosion.

“Peter, you know that I am incredibly supportive of your father regaining his memory and processing it in a less apocalyptic way. I mean, for his own safety and the safety of others.” Astrid was steadfast. “But he cannot store the formula for dark matter in my recipe boxes!”

The younger Bishop raised both hands in surrender to the unnerved lab assistant. His coat hung open in the thaw of the basement laboratory. Through the room’s lone window, the Harvard campus was an ice rink.

“He misses you, Astrid,” Peter wavered questionably toward the empty coat rack. Astrid issued her permission with a tilt of her chin. “Any chance you could have packed some notes away in the move? Walter’s not the only one who likes to work at home.” He grinned, crossing the room’s thresh hold.

Olivia followed, her blond head ducked as she removed the hood of her standard-issue FBI parka. A warm black cap bordered her forehead, above the serious ridge of her brow. She pushed it back from her hairline, stuffing it into her coat with minimal fuss. She slid a file folder across the tabletop and plucked at her sleeves with newly-empty hands, shirking her parka likewise. Dunham tuned into the conversation already in progress with half an ear.

“He’s a terrible influence,” Astrid complained.

“Sure is,” Olivia corroborated with a smirk.

“She meant Walter,” Peter groused.

Olivia shrugged. “I didn’t,” she said breezily.

His features folded. A smile shaped itself from his three-days’ stubble that just that morning had been fixed between Olivia’s thighs. Until Broyles reminded them of their encroaching professional obligation. Peter had fumbled in the pockets of Olivia’s pleated pants with one free hand. Blindly he retrieved her chirping phone and handed it up to her. She, uncoordinated in passion’s throes, dropped it the device face down. It promptly struck her lover in the skull and answered itself.

“We have a case,” Olivia said, loudly enough to be heard in the lab’s back reaches, made swampy in the shadows created by the lights overhead. Her wedding ring drummed,loud against the table ledge. “A cable-news affiliate in Allston was cleared by what state authorities are calling a gas leak. Two desiccated bodies remain.” Dunham pared the folder open with a finger and revealed two photos made more gruesome by glossy photography.

Astrid craned her neck to see past Peter and suppressed a gag. “You seen these?” she asked him, her eyes dish-sized at his apparent composure.

“At breakfast,” Peter mumbled, busily clamping calipers to the posts of a tiny labyrinth. A motor beneath the homemade grid whirred and electricity’s hum was audible between segments. Bishop perched a palm against an ultrasonic scanner and awaited the neon readout of his cumulative charge. The connected circuits snapped dangerously with his individualized frequency. He curved fingers into a fist and removed contact from the scanner’s surface.

“Coworkers have been evasive and directed us to the channel’s corporate attorney.” She gave Peter’s ministrations a passing glance. Her lips bowed curiously and relaxed. “Most of the company’s investors are former infomercial magnates,” Olivia explained. “Famous for marketing the degree at home programs of the 1980s.”

“Massive Dynamic’s advertising budget was probably peanuts then,” Peter guessed. “Let’s hope that Walter’s cohort at least rubbed elbows in the entrepreneurial neighborhood.”

“Do you want me to get them?” Astrid asked the couple, glancing backward to the sealed door of the office. “Nina prefers Walter’s visits,” her voice softening conspiratorially. She must be lonesome for Bell.”

“If he comes out, he’s going to realize that you’ve misappropriated materials for the expressed purposes of electrocuting yourself,” Olivia told Peter, her expression alight with mischief. “Again.”

Peter scoffed. “I take issue with that word.” He crossed his arms, repeated and lengthened the phrase. “Mis-ah-pro-priated,” he said. “You’re living dream world if you think the parameters of appropriate use have widened far enough to include anything done here.”

“An ego can make a fool of the wisest man,” decreed a voice. Peter’s father emerged, the hinges of a door whining behind him as he crept into a square of light. A bundle squirmed in his arms, peaking its wool blanket.

“Rich, from you,” said Peter in a voice with no malice. “Give me that,” he said, reaching for the active heap.  
Etta emerged from the wool that cloaked her infant head, squealing. Her mouth latched to Peter’s sweater and bit down with two newly-acquired teeth. “Hey,” he warned, stroking over the flaxen strands of her hair, her glowing curls pressed flat against her scalp. She lifted a chubby hand to cover one eye, not quite finished with (or accurate in her understanding of) peekaboo. She pushed herself upward in her father’s arms and dove for his bristled jaw.

“Chrrsh,” she murmured, her vowels not yet mastered. Crash.

“How was she?” Peter asked Astrid, though his father leaned in instead, to answer.

“A perfect angel,” Astrid replied. “I brought her in a little early this morning.” She thumbed backward at Dr. Bishop. “You-know-who keeps the oddest hours.” She smiled patiently.

“Her reflexes are woeful,” Walter interjected, layered over his assistant’s kind summation. His weathered hid a sharp gaze. He jabbed a finger at Peter that hovered without contact. “Moro reflex. She doesn’t have it. If she does, it’s imperceptible.”

Peter rolled his eyes. He passed his daughter to Olivia, who offered a ready arm in passing. “The CCTV recordings and the time cards of current municipal employees in the immediate area...” she itemized for the voice at the other end of her phone.

“Walter,” Peter allowed in measured tones. “We have a credible pediatrician, whom you’ve met.”

The doctor had garnered his spot in the elder Bishop’s good graces by, essentially, not buying generic candy for patient reward. Bishop walked away with pockets full for sample. As vigilant parents, Peter and Olivia had run so thorough a background check on Dr. Gibbs that it nearly breached civilian propriety.

“Can’t have another member of the Fraternal Order Of Fucking Around With The Human Genome presiding over our child’s well-being,” Peter espoused, slouched over a glowing laptop.

“You never thought about pledging?” Olivia asked, then heavily pregnant and stretched against the headboard of their marital bed. She took a joyless swig of water. To hear Dunham tell it, you’d think Bishop baby-to-be had her bladder in a vice grip. The agent still peered mournfully into the wine aisle of their local grocery.

“That reflex disappears by four months,” Peter assured his father. He listened as the elderly man’s loafer-shod steps trailed him undeterred. “She’s past that milestone,” he reminded. “Today, however, is an unbirthday. We appreciate your recognition.” Grandfather’s habit was to recite Lewis Carroll to the infant from memory.

Peter attempted to derail the paternal surveillance and took refuge in a storage closet. He groped its shelves for a small metal cylinder, a the distillation column for a gas sample to be collected from the event scene. He cursed himself then, and surrendered to curiosity. “Am I to assume that you spent the better part of the pre-dawn throwing things at my daughter?” He peered over one shoulder.

“I simply turned her over, onto her back, and tested her aductor and abductor reflexes. There was never, nor will there ever be, harm to my son’s progeny by my hand,” Walter vowed gallantly. He studied his son’s flat expression and moved closer. “The Cortexiphan already present in Agent Dunham’s system may have altered placental mono-amine transmission. Which, in turn, affects neural proliferation. An-an-and,” he stuttered. “It may have interfered with programmed cell death in Etta’s brain. Such stressors could trigger an increased hormone response.”

Peter nodded. “A brain injury,” he parsed.

“Or,” Walter countered, his eyes shining. “An aptitude.”

Peter was suddenly conscious of the silence. Of dust motes that glinted by the industrial lamplight. Olivia just beyond the room. “Don’t-” warned Peter. He refused to brook further debate, his gaze steeled.

“You’ll need a micro-syringe and a liquid, ah, polymer,” Walter offered, his enthusiasm squelched and traded, instead, for defeat. He sighed. “I am only certain of the location of the syringe.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Etta?” Olivia parroted. She nipped indecisively at the inside of a cheek as she consulted the glossary of baby names and their meanings. “Sounds like the name of circus high-divers in cartoons,” she explained. “The ones who go a hundred feet straight down and into a barrel.”

“Pretty fearless,” Peter described.

“Where’s Lincoln?” Olivia asked. She scrolled her fingertips against her phone’s screen and ended her call. She tucked the device safely in hand to evade her infant’s eager ones.

Astrid poorly suppressed a laugh. “Well, I had to improvise, baby-proofing the toilet and...Lincoln will be late today. He’s waiting for the plumber.”

“Really?” Olivia gave a throaty laugh and indicated the lab’s narrow window. The view of the paved campus walkway was interrupted by a pair of polished dress shoes and pressed pants.

“Either Lincoln’s here or we’ve got an Observer in our midst,” Peter snorted.

“Peter!” Astrid chided. “You know he hates that joke!”

“He certainly does,” cited the man of the hour. Lincoln’s umbrella entered the room prior to his appearance and revealed him as he closed it with some difficulty. “I’ll be agonizing about my hairline next,” Lee said. He crossed the lab and planted a kiss on the crest of Farnsworth’s cheek. She blushed from sentiment or the brief contact of his cold nose against her flesh.

“Duty calls,” Olivia beckoned. Etta squirmed in her arms and reached beseechingly for his tie. “Gas leak at a news station,” she briefed him with a grin of preemptive consolation. “Had some pretty otherworldly consequences. We’re not in the business of accepting the ‘accident’ party line.” Olivia passed Etta to Astrid, as if to punctuate her assessment.

“It pays the bills,” agreed the meticulous Lincoln, hands clasped behind his back as he leaned free of Etta’s grasp.

“As you’ll know, news networks get their share of kooks mailing and phoning in. Someone will be dropping six months of phone records and fan mail,” Peter announced. “We need that thoroughly scrutinized. Particularly for the scientifically-connected kooks,” he stipulated.

“Wouldn’t your father be the best resource for--” Lincoln began.

“We’re off to Massive Dynamic. Any eureka moment the man has in that chemistry candy land will likely come too late. Besides,” Peter shrugged. “We’re hoping a social call will charm Nina Sharp.”

“Understood.” Lincoln conceded. He watched as son draped a coat over his father’s shoulders. Walter folded arms into the garment and shimmied the sleeves to his wrists.

“Goodbye, all,” Walter called gamely as the Bishop, Bishop and Dunham trio left for parts known but not quite understood.

Lincoln felt for a drawer beneath the laboratory table’s pocked surface. He retrieved a letter opener and regarded his reflection in its blade. “You know,” he said wistfully. “I used to carry a gun to work.”

“Yet you reached instinctively for the letter opener,” said Astrid. Etta whimpered, juggled on the assistant’s hip.

“Touché.”

“CompositeCorp was born as bleak world events turned the television audience away from regular commercials.” Nina Sharp explained. She rose from her desk, clad perpetually in funereal black. “Infomercials were a new medium. This new medium needed to be regulated and we,” she cleared her throat, her painted lips closed smugly, “had lobbyists in those seats. Standards were assessed. Production value increased.”

“A matter of opinion,” Peter barbed. Olivia’s gaze caught her husband’s as she subtly estimated his late night viewing.

“Yes, well,” Sharp interjected. A device in her robotic grip summoned a projected graph on the office wall.

“Belly wouldn’t do that. He was apolitical,” mumbled Walter. Shame curved the scientist’s spine deeply in the leather chair.

“William Bell was a businessman,” Sharp reminded. “Profit margins skyrocketed at the rate of almost two million a year following our investment. Shares sold internationally, as well. Connections that flourish, despite present day tumult.”

She looked down at her hands for a moment, her flesh aged but supple in appearance. Maybe with time Walter Bishop would make a suitable acting CEO. And were that not the case, the right hand did not always need to know what it was the left was doing, Nina decided.

“Is it true that a substantial portion of that revenue is made by Massive Dynamic’s legal team?” queried Olivia. Her low-heeled shoe jiggled, one knee bent atop its opposite. “I’m told that they’ve reached settlement lows in consumer lawsuits. Yet you’ve somehow escaped bad press.”

“The paper trail - on official channels at least- is stunningly brief to downright nonexistent,” Peter mentioned.

“I don’t know why you ask me things with such hostile specificity, Agent Dunham. We do work for our subsidiaries and are compensated for our services. Full disclosure, of course. It’s far simpler to handle matters in-house,” Sharp defended. “And you, Peter. This company is a boon of an inheritance. A real cash cow for you,” she sniffed.

“Oh, he’s already inheriting a cow, God willing.” Walter piped up in a conspiratorial whisper . He turned, arm slung against the chair back as company arrived. The automatic door gave its breathy hiss, allowing physicist and techno-phile Brandon entry. Brownie crumbs decorated the lapels of his lab coat. The remainder of dessert was clutched in a hammy fist.

“Got evidence back there if you guys want a peek at it,” Brandon said.

Sharp’s harried assistant skittered to a stop, a second interloper to match the first. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Sharpe, I --” she apologized.

Nina silently reached into her desk for a wet nap and handed it to the younger woman, reluctant to touch the sticky employee for whom it was meant.

“You’re cute,” Brandon complimented the blonde as he accepted her small and mandated kindness. “Have I asked you out before?”

Peter winced.

“Does right now count?” She rolled her eyes and moved toward the exit. Olivia’s lips twitched with a sympathetic smile for the target of his affection.

“I don’t know why you have employees confiscating evidence in the federal jurisdiction--” Dunham began. The agent’s expression was too quickly dispelled in favor of indignant persecution, her eyes blazing.

“We have a task force of investigators and chemical analysts,” Nina reminded the agent coolly. “Ex-Boston P.D. and...” Brandon shifted his chest outward pridefully.

“Come on back!” he beckoned, starved for company, if nothing else.

They followed. Peter kept an ear tuned to the hum of conversation, the syllables significantly shy of real discern. The many halls were similar in their sterility, and seemed to double back on themselves at every turn. He touched his father’s arm mindfully and squeezed.

Brandon folded himself into a swivel chair at a large white table in the dimly lit laboratory. His face shown, pasty, in the lit tubules that topped the apparatus before him. Walter, Peter and Olivia lingered before its square and stove-like bottom.

“Chromatography,” Walter whispered with peculiar reverence “Heat turns the gas to vapor for better analysis. Fractal distillation. Splits the substance at its boiling point,” he explained. “We brought a tube and an micro-syringe for an inlet,” Walter told Brandon, bashful at the equipment made rudimentary by comparison.”

“There’s something to be said for minutiae,” Brandon consoled. “I apologize for making you drag your kit all the way out here. It must be so fragile.” He drummed hands atop an overturned paper cup, and turned it upright as he lifted it, rhythmically. He snickered and collected himself, the cinematic reference lost.

Peter imagined the zeroes on his paycheck. It must, he thought, be so much easier for him to sleep at night. Human horror, split into serviceable task.

“We shouldn’t have tested the air. Not when we have this,” Brandon indicated the vessel’s paper rim. “Evidence of something called....Leiner’s disease?”

“That’s typically present--” interjected Peter.

“In infants,” finished Olivia. Her sleek ponytail fathered her shoulders as she raised her head. “Dermatological. Red skin, not...deep, mortal...fissures.”

“We expect that it’s a synthetic mutation,” Brandon said, pointing a gloved finger to commend the couple’s correct conclusion. “The victim, one Tracey Snell, was found to be suffering from anemia and reduced proteins in the blood. Symptoms of the disease.”

“Everyone downplayed it as an eating disorder, if they acknowledged it at all,” added Olivia.

“If the symptoms were gradual, so was the exposure,” Peter pointed out. Walter clapped him on the back in quiet commendation.

“Bingo. Her electrolytes, too, bottomed out. Organs failed. We suspect she that she seized multiple times.” Brandon described. “We’ll know more when the autopsy results roll in. I’ll pester the M.E,” he volunteered happily. “Let me be your emissary, keep you on the up and up.” He stood, splitting the group as he rushed their middle. He rattled through some loud miscellany, and scribbled a note furtively on a clean napkin. “What else am I going to use them for?” he snorted. He shoved the cheap missive into Peter’s hand. “You didn’t hear it from me,” said the scientist. “You didn’t hear it at all.”

Uriah O’Dowd, Esq, it read.

Spoons rang against ceramic cups. Steam rose from the burbling machines behind the long counter. The rising heat veiled the friendly baristas in sweat. A crescent of strollers ringed one table as a moms’ group chattered loudly. Writers’ chewed pencils and tapped inconsistently at keyboards, competent in neither medium. Rain dotted the glass pane at the shop front. The smell of damp asphalt pricked the figure’s nose. A sweatshirt hung around the shape. The garment had stolen from a donation bin with ingenuity, some time ago.

“6!” called the barista.

The figure tucked her hands into the sleeves, fingers sweeping the fleece lining. Her nostrils flared with labored breath. Her nose was raw. Her nerves were raw.

“6!” Again. Her head pounded as she lifted herself to standing. She braced herself against the table and flexed her knees, using momentum to propel herself, slowly, toward the green beacon of the cup.

“6!” The barista demanded. Failed to notice her, she guessed. Her dirty sneakers pressed streaks against the hardwood. She trembled.

She reached for the beverage marked in distracted hand.

_Snell._


End file.
